101 Microsoft Visual Basic .Net Applications

Jerry Bucknoff wrote a review where he says skip the book because you can just download the code. I don't get this. I buy a book for more than just the CD stuffed in the back. This book has 500+ pages that taught me how to do in VB.NET, the things I knew how to do in VB6. Maybe if you're a rocket scientist, you can just stare at the code and learn everything, but those 500 pages really got me up to speed on .NET.

This is the most PRACTICAL book I've seen on VB.Net. I've been working with VB.Net since it came out, but there were still a lot of problems with common situations. For example, he explains and illustrates Crystal Reports bettern than the only book I've found on Crystal Reports. He gets into the arcane world of forms that update SQL databases and the black art of binding with a "here's how to do it" approach. Generally speaking, he seems to have gone through the million-or-so class libraries and told you about the ones you really should know about and how to use them. A joy and a relief!

I've been developing .NET apps for just about two years since beta 1 and really wish this book was around when I first started. The only thing I can say bad about it is that I would have liked it before I spent a lot of time trial-and-erroring my way through things. I can't blame the authors though, books this cool take a while to write!It's really a cool layout and and you feel yourself caught in the momentum. Example after example and very concise and to the point. Few books make their point(s) so quickly and succinctly. Not a lot of fluff or general comments (which certainly belong in many books), but it really gets to the point on each and every example. I found it very easy to read, it made me want to read on, it was very well written and all of the code worked flawlessly.If you are starting out in .NET, this book will save you HOURS, and in many instances, DAYS and perhaps weeks. If you are an experienced developer, there is still a lot that you may have not come across yet and this book will certainly have some great information for you.I've never purchased anything by Sean or Campbell, but if this is any indication of their work, I'll definitely be buying whatever else they write.

The person who wrote the previous comment didn't read the book's opening pages in the introduction. All of the 101 Samples in the book are online! Each one is very cool and runs right away. The samples in the book are snippets from those examples with plenty of explanatory text for each sample.

I've found this book to be one of the most useful that I own. It has, literally, tons of code that (for once) is designed to be "real world", and includes actual error checking! As I migrate myself over from VB6, it's been really nice when I think "I know how to do this in VB6, I wonder how I do the same thing in .NET". I highly recommend.